♦ The University of Tampa has announced it will begin offering an undergraduate major in cybersecurity this fall.

♦ Saint Leo University launched a master’s program in cybersecurity in August, complementing its undergraduate program in information assurance and security.

♦ The brand new Florida Polytechnic University in Lakeland has a concentration in information assurance and cybersecurity in its computer science and information technology degree track.

♦ Last year, buoyed by a $5 million allocation from the Legislature, the Florida Cybersecurity Center, or FC², opened on the campus of USF, acting as a statewide clearinghouse to share knowledge, resources and training among the state’s 12 public universities.

Myris, a sleek handheld iris scanner, brings biometric security to home computers. The device plugs into a USB port and takes a split-second video of both eyes, scanning more than 240 points in each. A government-grade encrypted digital signature syncs with passwords stored on Myris, and never on your desktop. Once it verifies a match, it automatically signs the user into accounts through a browser extension. Since no two irises are alike, the chance of a false positive is less than one in two trillion.

Cisco and McAfee have rolled out products intended to function as central hubs. Cisco’s is called the Platform Exchange Grid, and McAfee’s is the Threat Intelligence Exchange(see video). In February, CSG Invotas introduced Security Orchestrator, a program that unifies security data onto a single screen and can automate some functions. An employee in the IT department can push a button to reset a compromised user’s password instead of having to do it manually. “Our tool turns that data into actions, and when we turn that data into actions, it doesn’t require people to do what machines do a whole lot better,” says CSG Invotas’s chief information security officer, Peter Clay.

Gillis now runs Bracket Computing, a startup that on Oct. 22 unveiled software designed to make public clouds secure enough for sensitive corporate data. Essentially, Bracket’s software wraps a company’s business applications in a bubble of encryption without making the applications harder to manage. “If we demonstrate that the public cloud is every bit as good, why would anyone build another data center?” says Gillis.

Security software is typically designed to protect a particular application or type of data. Bracket encrypts everything before it gets to the cloud servers, leaving the customer with the only key to decrypt it. Its setup also seeks to simplify how IT is managed.

Pindrop analyzes phone calls for call center workers to determine whether the people on the other end are trying to defraud the company. The software quickly pinpoints a call’s city of origin without tracing it.

Crime syndicates in Russia use some of the most technologically advanced tools in the trade, according to Sherry. “The Russians are at the top of the food chain when it comes to elite cyberskill hacking capabilities,” he says. Even before the latest revelations of stolen online records, the United States charged a Russian man, Evgeniy Bogachev, of participating in a large-scale operation to infect hundreds of thousands of computers around the world. The massive data breach of the retailer Target last year has also been traced to Eastern Europe. But why Russia, and its smaller neighbors? Trained computer engineers and skilled techies in Russia and countries like Ukraine and Romania may be opting for lucrative underground work instead of the often low-paying I.T. jobs available there.

Traditionally when a user types in a web address, his web browser sends a request to access the site’s servers. CloudFlare acts as a virtual middleman, fielding requests and neutralizing threats. The startup also stores some of its customers’ content on servers across the U.S., Europe, and Australia, an approach that enables pages to load superfast because the content is located closer to the web surfer. It’s an approach not unlike that of older rival Akamai Technologies , but CloudFlare uses a freemium model: A free basic plan promises sites speed tweaks and protection. Paid options serve up faster performance and deeper security features. As Prince likes to point out, his little startup now signs up as many as 5,000 new users a day, roughly the size of Akamai’s entire client base.

A German startup is offering a high-tech monitoring system for this problem, which is set to grow more urgent as the developed world begins dealing with a spike in senior citizens. The company has developed an advanced, conductive textile floor covering they call SensFloor that detects when people are walking or lying on it. The innovation is already alerting European nursing homes when a senior has fallen.

Their flooring is a polyester fleece textile measuring just eight-hundredths of an inch in thickness. They use an ordinary textile production process to laminate a thin, conductive piece of metal into the fleece to make patterns like those found on circuit boards. Some parts of the pattern become sensor fields and others become conductive lanes. These are connected to embedded radio modules that communicate real-time data to the system’s cigarette-box-sized controller.

I heard Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland As, describe in a humorous talk how the book Moneyball came to be. The author Michael Lewis initially told him he was working on an article for the New York Times. A few weeks later it had turned into a longer article for the NYT Magazine. A few months later, the conversations had become the basis for the best selling book.

I chuckled when I saw Lewis interview a panel of sports executives last year. I wondered if they were wondering where the conversation would show up in Lewis’s prolific writing. Certainly as I was reading Lewis’ new book Flash Boys I kept wondering how he got so many of the characters to talk so openly and in so much technical detail.

So, as a fellow author, I found the book fascinating.

As a technologist, I enjoyed all the details of speed of electrons via fiber and microwave, the mining of competitive intelligence via LinkedIn, the mindset of Russian coders and the gritty nuances of trading systems.

But, taking those author and technologist hats off, I found the book somewhat plodding. The blistering start turns out to be difficult to sustain. The main characters are not that interesting. Most of them are workaholics and not sure allowed Lewis too much insight into their personal lives. Lewis’ snark makes for lively reading, though. He describes an Irish character : “(had) the uneasy caution of a man who has survived one potato famine and is expecting another”

The book also does not have clear villains. The high frequency traders are mostly faceless (and he ends the book with a cryptic pointer to one of them). The Feds – the SEC and the FBI - come across as incompetent more than evil. Goldman Sachs comes off looking bad in several parts of the book, but gets more sympathetic treatment towards the end. If there is a clear “bad guy” it is Regulation NMS which while well intentioned has allowed speed to trump other goals trading systems should be focused on.

The gist of the book comes in this sentence “The entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandals ….linked together tail to trunk like circus elephants”. And in talking to folks in New York recently many have dismissed the book as Lewis’ morality play.

To me, the scary takeaway is in our growing digital world the scandals are going to be ever more geeky with most regulators and common folk having even less of a chance of catching on for a long, long time.